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Storing user-created articles in your database as Markdown Syntax instead of the final rendered HTML solves so many problems. It’s not only more secure and helps you prevent XSS injections into your content, but it also makes it much more flexible to change the rendered version of the content at a later stage in the lifetime of your application.

This article that you’re reading right now has been written using Markdown Syntax. That’s how it’s being stored in the database, and then whenever you visit this page where the article is stored, Python code converts it into HTML and then add custom features such as classes, ids or other HTML attributes to selected elements, and then serves it to your browser.

This means that the creation of the content is strictly separated and decoupled from how it’s being rendered in its final form. Separating the logic related to the content in this manner brings many different benefits compared to creating the content using a WYSIWYG HTML Editor.

1. Markdown is a light text markup format and a processor to convert that to HTML. The originator describes it as follows: Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
2. Above is how I pass it to the HTML page and it renders on the page with the proper HTML tags, but it doesn't seem to use them. Below is how it appears on the browser. # HTML HTML is a markup language that can be used to define the structure of a web page.

What’s Wrong with WYSIWYG HTML Editors?

For example, let’s say that we use a WYSIWYG HTML Editor to allow users to create their content. We then store this HTML in our database and serve it straight from the database whenever a user visits the page of the article. This setup means that we have to be concerned about the following things:

• Javascript injections into the content.
• A non-standardized look of articles and content.
• How the stored content will adapt to future changes to our design.
• Invalid HTML Markup.

What if we later realize that we want to modify the HTML of our articles? For example, let’s say that we want all <table> elements to have a certain class, or we want all links to be rel='nofollow', or we want all headlines to have an id attribute so that we can link to them?

Python Markdown To Html Download

We already stored the HTML and we are expecting to be able to use it straight from the database, so any kind of change or feature that we want to add that is related to our content would require us to write scripts or queries that updates the stored HTML from previous articles.

It quite quickly becomes tiresome and prone to mistakes and bugs, and it might lead to the developer avoiding updating older content, which in turn leads to our website having non-standardized formatting of the articles.

How to Use Markdown Syntax with Python

For most things you can think of, there is a python library available for it. So is naturally also the case for Markdown. There is a library called Python-Markdown that can easily be installed with pip using the following command:

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The library offers multiple useful methods and tools for when it comes to working with strings that are formatted using Markdown Syntax. For example, we can easily turn Markdown into HTML with a single method call.

The Markdown library also comes with the ability to add different types of extensions that modify the behavior or the way that markdown parse the Markdown Syntax. For example, you can modify how lists are parsed using the Sane Lists extension, or you can add code highlights of any <code> block using the CodeHilite extension.

Add Code Highlights using the CodeHilite Markdown Extension

So let’s illustrate how you can activate an extension for the markdown library to modify the way it generates HTML out of your Markdown Syntax. In this case, we will add code highlights to <code> blocks that match the programming language that is being used.

If we don’t install any extension, code blocks are generated in the following manner:

Fluke networks others driver download. Gets rendered as:

So technically, it works. It does understand that it is a code block and it wraps it as a <code> element. But what if we want to add highlights so that different syntax is colored in different colors, to improve the readability for the visitors that come to read our articles?

We might want to wrap the print( part with a <span> to make it red, and then wrap the string within with a <span> that turn it into a green color. It would be a mess to attempt to do all of this by hand, and this is exactly the kind of things that the “CodeHilite” extension does for us.

To be able to enable the extension, we first have to install its dependency Pygments. Pygments is a popular syntax highlighter written in python and it is what takes care of the bulk of the work that the CodeHilite extension does. We can install it using pip.

To enable the CodeHilite extension, all we have to do is to add the extensions kwarg to our markdown() call that turn our Markdown Syntax into HTML.

This then wraps our code into the following HTML syntax:

But obviously, just wrapping things in <span> elements doesn’t do much. What does class='k' or class='p' even mean? Where are those styles defined? Well for this we have to import a CSS stylesheet that defines all of the style rules required.

To do this, we can either generate our own styles which are documented in the CodeHilite Documentation by using the following command:

The command will generate a styles.css file for us that is populated with style rules that expect the code highlighting to be wrapped in a container with the .codehilite class.

The other alternative is to check out GitHub user richleland who have created multiple presets that follow common IDE styles that we can use.

How to Modify Markdown’s Generated HTML with BeautifulSoup

So now we have installed the markdown library and we’ve learned how to add extensions that modify some of the generated HTML. But what if we also want to add our own custom attribute to different HTML elements?

For example, right now a user can create an HTML link using the Markdown Syntax. By default the HTML element is just a pure <a> element. But what if we want to add rel='nofollow' or target='_blank' to each link?

Well, we could create a Markdown Extension to achieve this, but we can also use something like BeautifulSoup4 to parse and modify the HTML that has been generated before we serve it to the user. This gives us a lot of choices and possibilities to add anything we’d like to our final output.

Install BeautifulSoup4

BeautifulSoup4 is a super popular library that gives the developer an amazing set of tools to easily parse and modify HTML. It’s both being used by web crawlers to understand contents of websites, but it can also be used by us to read and modify HTML elements on the fly before it’s served to our users.

We can install BeautifulSoup4 using pip.

We are then ready to use it in our code by importing it as:

Python Markdown To Html Converter

Use BeautifulSoup to Modify HTML In-Place

So let’s take the example that we used in the section above regarding modifying <a> elements and add things such as target='_blank' or rel='nofollow' attributes to it.

Here’s an example of how this could be achieved:

This will then do the following things:

• Use the markdown library to turn our Markdown Syntax to HTML.
• Use the codehilite extension to add Code highlights to any code blocks.
• Turn the HTML into a BeautifulSoup object that allows us to easily search and iterate through it.
• Add rel and target attributes to all HTML <a> elements. This all happens in-place.
• Finally turn the BeautifulSoup object into HTML and return it.

It’s easy to imagine a lot of other things you can achieve with this combination of tools such as:

• Make all images responsive by adding img-fluid Boostrap classes to them.
• Add title and alt tags to images and links to improve On-Page SEO.
• Treat internal links and external links differently and set different rel values depending on where they link.
• Add id to elements so that they can be anchored and linked to.

Benefits and Conclusion of Markdown Syntax over HTML WYSIWYG

This style of working and storing content is the way that this website stores and manage the content of all articles. It has many different benefits over the traditional WYSIWYG method where you store the final HTML ready to be served.

• We have more control of the HTML that we output since we process it before rendering it. It’s not completely in the hands of the users.
• Users can focus more on the content they produce, than how it is supposed to look like in its final form.
• Since we never allow users to input raw HTML, we can treat it all as unsafe and completely prevent things like Javascript injections.
• All of our articles will always look the same and follow the same style guides. We will never have an article that has a different font size on one of their headlines than another.

Some people argue that Markdown Syntax is more difficult to learn than using WYSIWYG HTML Editors. This is simply not true. First of all, you can use editors for Markdown Syntax as well that allow you to have shortcuts to do things like bold text, add links or upload images. Generic mice & touchpads driver.

Second of all, Markdown Syntax is no doubt simpler than HTML and XML.

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In the previous article we looked at what static sites are, and how they work.

Now we will look at how to convert a single markdown file into an HTML file.

The conversion process

This diagram from the previous article shows the basic process for converting a set of markdown files into the required HTML files for a complete website:

This time we will look in more detail at what is involved in converting a single page of markdown into the corresponding HTML file:

Here is an example markdown file, test.md:

This actually isn't a pure markdown file. The top part of the file is meta-data for the page, in a format called yaml. Many static site generators use a similar system. The yaml is contained between the two '---' markers. The rest of the file (after the second '---') is the markdown content of the file. But for brevity we will call the entire file a markdown file.

Converting this page to HTML actually involves 4 separate tasks:

• Split the file into yaml and markdown parts
• Extract the meta-data from the YAML.
• Convert the markdown to an HTML fragment (the page content).
• Combine the meta-data and page content with the HTML template to create a complete HTML file.

Fortunately, if we use the right Python libraries, each of these steps is very easy.

Splitting the file

This part is fairly standard Python. We read the markdown file in, line by line, and create two strings, ym that contains the yaml text, and md that contains the markdown text.

Python allows us to treat a text file as a sequence of lines of text, that we can loop through using a for loop.

The first loop discards strings until we find the first '---'. The second loop reads all the strings until the next '---'. Those are the yaml_lines. Finally, all the remaining lines after the second '---' are the markdown data.

We join all the yaml_lines to form a string ym. We join all the lines of markdown data to form the string md.

Parsing the yaml data

We will use the Python yaml library to parse the yaml data, like this:

This parses a block of yaml text and creates a dictionary with the result. Here is what it prints:

This is the same data as we had on the test.md file, but now in the form of a Python dictionary.

Notice that the tags element has a list of values. That is because the yaml header uses a syntax for tags that allows for multiple values.

Converting the markdown data

Here we convert the second part of the file, the markdown data, into an html fragment, like this:

Python Markdown To Html With Css

We are using the markdown library to do the conversion. This takes a markdown format string and returns an html string. Based on the markdown code above, the html content string will be:

As you can see it correctly marked up the bold and italic text, hyperlink, and image. The markdown method has several extensions that can be added, for example to provide syntax highlighting, but we aren't using those here.

The output is an html fragment. It places each paragraph inside its own paragraph tags, but it doesn't provide higher level tags such as a body tag. It is assumed that the html fragment will be place within a full html document (which we will do next).

Creating the full html

We create our final html using a template like this:

This template is just a basic html page. For a real website, you would probably want to use something more sophisticated, maybe a responsive template and some CSS styling.

But the basic method is the same. You use a full html page template, but with placeholders for variable content such as the title of the page, the author's name, and the main content itself.

The placeholders are enclosed in double curly brackets, for example {{title}}. We use the pystache module to substitute real values for the placeholders to create the final html. Here is the code:

The render function accepts the html template, plus a dictionary that maps the template names on to their values.

Notice that the info dictionary we are using comes straight from the yaml parser. It already contains entries for the title, author and date. The trick here is to make sure that each tag in the html template exactly matches the equivalent field in the yaml header. That way, pystache will be looking for the same tags that the yaml parser stored.

Well that isn't quite true. The info dictionary doesn't yet have an entry for content, because the content comes from the markdown. So we add and extra element to the dictionary, called 'content', containing the processed markdown content.

The other thing to notice is that we use triple brackets for content - {{{content}}}. The reason for this is that the content is raw html data:

Python Convert Html To Markdown

• For {{value}}, pystache renders the value assuming it is text that you want to display. If it contains html characters such as < it will use escape characters so the the symbol is displayed as a < in the browser. That is what you would want in the page title, for instance.
• For {{{value}}}, pystache renders the text unaltered, so it the text contains <p>, it will cause a paragraph break. This is what you want for the page content, which does include paragraph breaks.

Putting it all together

This has taken a bit of explaining, but if you actually look at the code to convert the yaml plus markdown into a final html page, it is remarkably simple:

Python Markdown To Html Example

In the next article we will look at how to build a complete site.